Deborah Roberts features in 'A Picture Gallery of the Soul'
The Katherine E. Nash Gallery presents 'A Picture Gallery of the Soul', a group exhibition of over 100 Black American artists whose practice incorporates photography. Featuring a range of photographic expressions from traditional photography to mixed media and conceptual art and spanning a timeframe that includes the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, the exhibition honours, celebrates, investigates, and interprets Black history, culture, and politics in the United States.
From the daguerreotypes made by Jules Lion in New Orleans in 1840 to the Instagram post of the Baltimore Uprising made by Devin Allen in 2015, photography has chronicled Black American life and Black Americans have defined the possibilities of photography. Frederick Douglass, a former enslaved person, and nationally prominent abolitionist recognized the quick, easy and inexpensive reproducibility of photography. He presciently developed a theoretical framework for understanding the implications of photography on public discourse in a series of four lectures. The exhibition title comes from Douglass' Lecture on Pictures, delivered in Boston in 1861 during the Civil War.
